SharePoint 2013 - crawler has insufficient permissions to crawl file shares

While setting up an environment for a demo that would be using a search content source that was crawling a file share I ran across this issue.

You are unable to crawl the data in the share regardless of the NTFS or share permissions you set on the directory.

To resolve this issue, assign the Manage Auditing And Security Log permission to the SharePoint 2013 crawler. To do this, follow these steps on the computer that hosts the file shares:

1. Click Start, click Run, type gpedit.msc, and then click OK.
2. Navigate to the following location in the Local Group Policy Editor:
   Computer Configuration\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Local Policies\User Rights Assignment
3. In the right pane, locate and right-click Manage auditing and security log, and then click Properties.
4. Click the Add User or Group button in the Manage auditing and security log properties dialog box, and then add the crawl account that the SharePoint 2013 crawler uses.
5. Click OK in the Manage auditing and security log properties dialog box.

Note If you assign the Manage Auditing And Security Log permission by using a Group Policy Object (GPO), add the crawl account to the GPO.

This information was pulled from the following technet article
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2817731

SharePoint 2013 - MySite Newsfeed displays "There was a problem retrieving the latest activity. Please try again later"

As I continue to go into more configuration around 2013 it is bringing back the memories of all the strange things that were encountered when deploying 2010 farms not long after it released. Fortunately 2013 has been out for a little while now and there are a lot of good folk's out there that started digging in early and have posted a lot of really good information on the issues they have run across during their configurations.

This is another one of the many issues that I have run across and was fortunate to find someone else out there that posted a good article on the issue and the resolution.

This error was due to the service account that is used to run the UPA service application not having permissions on the UPA it self. After adding the service account that the UPA application pool runs under to the UPA the My Sites news feed's begain showing up correctly.

Thanks to Andy Dawson for posting his detailed article on the issue with the details of the fix. He also provides a handy powershell script so you can automate this more in your farm configurations.

Article for doing it via Central Admin
http://blogs.blackmarble.co.uk/blogs/adawson/post/2012/10/30/SharePoint-2013-MySite-Newsfeed-displays-There-was-a-problem-retrieving-the-latest-activity-Please-try-again-later.aspx#id_0034c967-d124-45ac-a539-1e710d5f2391

Article on powershell script
http://blogs.blackmarble.co.uk/blogs/adawson/post/2012/11/23/Setting-SharePoint-2013-User-Profile-Service-Application-Permissions-Using-PowerShell.aspx

SharePoint 2013 My Site tasks not updating and show old updated date - Last updated at 1/1/1901 12:00AM

While working through some SharePoint 2013 configuration for an upcoming demo I ran across an issue where when you go to your my site and click on the tasks link you will get the error below

Sorry, we are having trouble refreshing your tasks
or
Last updated at 1/1/1901 12:00AM

After doing some research I ran across the following article that described the issue and provided a fix. It seems that the UPA security setup in 2013 has changed from 2010 as adding additional accounts to the UPA was not required.

For me the issue ended up being that the account I used for the work management service application had not been added to the UPA. After doing this and running an incremental crawl the tasks were showing up from other site collections for the user.

Thanks to Hong Gyem for publishing the information on the issue and the fix
http://honggyem.blogspot.com/2013/05/my-tasks-not-updating-seen-following.html

SharePoint 2013 - Central Admin site prompts for authentication over and over and fails to load from remote server

Noticed something on a recent 2013 farm build where Central Administration site opened correctly from the server it was running on, but when you tried to open it from another server in the farm or a workstation you were prompted for authentication three times and it never succeeded.

This seemed like a behavior I have seen in the past when working with Kerberos based web applications that did not have the SPN's configured correctly. I checked the authentication provider on Central Admin and found it was set to Kerberos instead of NTLM. Since the client is not utilizing Kerberos I changed to NTLM, saved changes, and after this could access CA from other servers in the farm.

I looked again at my script and realized that I had not set the authentication provider switch correctly so this is why it had been set to Kerberos

Microsoft SQL Server 2012, 2008R2, 2008, 2005, 2000 and 7.0 Builds

Ran across this site and it has all the needed SP build numbers for multiple versions of the product. Also has some other helpful links on how to get build numbers, etc.

Microsoft SQL Server 2012, 2008R2, 2008, 2005, 2000 and 7.0 Builds
http://sqlserverbuilds.blogspot.com/

March and April CU for 2013

It seems that the CU's for 2013 are coming quicker than they did for 2010. The March CU was launched and now has to be installed in order to apply any future updates.

April 2013 CU also released and looking through the details for SP Server it appears that most of the issues are around sites and service applications that were migrated from 2010.

March CU
http://blogs.technet.com/b/stefan_gossner/archive/2013/03/21/march-public-update-for-sharepoint-2013-available-and-mandatory.aspx

April CU
http://blogs.technet.com/b/stefan_gossner/archive/2013/04/27/april-2013-cu-for-sharepoint-2013-has-been-released.aspx

Hopefully we don't see the same issues that we did with 2010 where CU's are released, pulled, and then released again.

Passed 70-668 for MCITP

I finally sat the 70-668 SharePoint 2010 Administration test this past Thursday. I have been working with 2010 for a couple years now, but was still nervous about sitting the test as I am just not a good test guy. I was very pleased when It was all over and I passed with an acceptable score.

Now its time to start working toward the first dev test.